Buster Midnight's Cafe (20 page)

“How do you feel about May Anna?” Whippy Bird asked after I told her the whole story.

“I don’t know. She testified in Buster’s favor, but she could have done more. A lot more. But Buster says she needs us.”

Whippy Bird thought that over and said, “Buster’s right. You know, Effa Commander, we’re May Anna’s best friends. That means we have to stick by her even when she does something that stinks. She’s not as strong as us. She could crack. If Buster doesn’t blame her, then it’s not our business to blame her either.”

I felt like somebody was on either side of me, pulling, like I was going to be split down the middle. It hurt to think that May Anna had not been a true friend to Buster like he always was to her. Then I thought maybe she did the best she could. I decided Whippy Bird was right, like she always is. This was between Buster and May Anna. Our job was to be May Anna’s friend. Being a friend meant helping the other person even when she was wrong. That’s why I told May Anna her testimony kept Buster from being found guilty of a worse charge, like voluntary manslaughter. Or first degree.

I could see that May Anna thought over what I said but I don’t know if she believed it.

Buster got two years. The newspapers printed headlines about him for a few days. I remember one in particular that said:
MIDNIGHT FOR BUTTE BOXER BUSTER.
Then everybody forgot about him.

I wrote Buster every week when he was in prison, and though he never wrote back, I knew he got the letters. Toney, who’d been writing Whippy Bird since the day he joined the navy, said my letters cheered up Buster more than anything. May Anna wrote him, too. She said she’d wait for him. She wanted to pay for the lawyer, but Buster said no. He also told her not to write him anymore. He explained that when he got out, he wouldn’t be seeing her again. They ought to forget each other. Being together wouldn’t be any good for either of their careers. Whippy Bird said what career did Buster have left anymore, anyway.

The trial was the beginning of what they called May Anna’s mature career and of the series of movies that made her rank as one of the Ten Best Motion Picture Actresses of All Time. The reviewers said May Anna had an air of tragedy about her. “Baptism by fire,” one of them wrote. Of course, you know May Anna won the Academy Award for
The Sin of Rachel Babcock.
She was nominated twice after that. She never had to play a gangster moll again or anything else she didn’t want to. From then until the end of her life, May Anna wrote her own ticket in that town.

Life changed after the trial for me and Whippy Bird, too. When the war ended, Toney came home minus one leg and with a purple heart. Three days later he and Whippy Bird got married.

Buster served his two years and was released not long after Whippy Bird and Toney got married. Then he hit the road. He wasn’t Buster Midnight anymore. He was too old and out of shape to defend his championship title even if he still retained it, which he didn’t. I don’t think he had the will to fight either. Every now and then we’d hear about him. He sent Toney a picture postcard from Australia saying he was fighting there under another name. Then there was a story in the paper about a television wrestler in New York called the Butte Bomber that the reporter claimed was really Buster Midnight. There weren’t any pictures, and we didn’t get TV in Butte then so we never saw those wrestling matches. We knew it was the real Butte Bomber, though, because about that time Toney got a postcard from Buster saying he was in charge of a crew of Mexicans picking oranges in Florida. Later on, I got a crate of oranges in the mail. There wasn’t any card with it, but I knew they were from Buster. I shared them with Whippy Bird and Toney and with Moon, who sometimes stopped by my house after school even though he was in the fifth grade and had his own friends.

A couple of months later, I got a sterling silver teaspoon with oranges on the handle from Florida, and I knew that came from Buster, too.

Of course, I moved out when Whippy Bird and Toney got married. Toney insisted he’d given the house to both of us and that he wanted to buy my share. I told him what he’d done was given me a place to live free throughout the war. I surely was grateful for that, but I always thought of it as Whippy Bird’s house, not mine. Besides, I was sure Toney had gone through his money, and what was he going to use to buy my half? So I gave Whippy Bird and Toney my part of the house as a wedding gift. They lived there until Toney bought a house off South Main by where the Pay and Takit Market used to be.

It was a happy wedding, but it was different from when Whippy Bird and Chick were married. They were older, and Toney was a disabled war veteran, so we celebrated with champagne and a cake I made, instead of getting drunk on Shawn O’s like we did the first time she got married. I knew from the day Whippy Bird got the first letter from Toney, which was addressed exclusively to her and not to me and her, that if Toney survived the war, he would come home to Whippy Bird. Toney always was sweet on her though she didn’t care about him when she was young because she was crazy about Chick. But in his letters, Whippy Bird saw a new Toney. “Chick will always be in my heart, just like Pink for you,” she told me. “You don’t live on memories, though, and it’s time Moon had a father.” She was surely right.

Me and Whippy Bird always acted like Moon was the man of the house, and she worried that he wouldn’t like Toney taking over. That’s because sometimes Toney treated Moon like a little kid. Whippy Bird loved Toney, but Moon was her son. But they both loved Whippy Bird, so they made it work. Right after the wedding, Toney held out his hand to Moon and said, “Hi, soldier.”

Moon took that hand and said, “Hi, Dad.” And that’s the way it always was with those two. They shared Whippy Bird.

When he was grown up, I asked Moon what he thought about Toney taking Chick’s place. “I never minded because Toney and Buster were my heroes. Remember how Toney treated me like a mascot at Buster’s training camp?” Moon replied. “Besides, Toney didn’t take my dad’s place. He took yours. That’s what I resented. But it turned out you were always around our place anyway so I didn’t mind after a while. What really happened was I ended up with three parents.”

Whippy Bird worried about me, also. “You know, Effa Commander, I’m never going to have as much fun with a husband as I did with you. I’m going to have to learn to cook, too, because Toney’s used to eating in fancy places. And you’re going to be a lady of leisure with nobody to look after but yourself.” That meant she was afraid I’d be lonely.

“Don’t you worry about me, Whippy Bird. I’m going to sleep till noon and eat chocolates without worrying about Moon seeing me and not even make my bed if I don’t want to.”

“You’re always welcome at our house. Always,” she said.

“I know that,” I told her. “I also know things are different now. Me and you’ve been running in neutral for a long time, but it’s time to shift and get in gear. You’ve already done it. Now I’ve got to get myself up the pass.” That was surely true. When I said that, I realized I’d been using Whippy Bird and Moon as a reason not to get on with my life. I knew with Whippy Bird and Toney married, they didn’t want me hanging around all the time. Whippy Bird had her work cut out for her because Toney was used to the big time, and there wasn’t going to be the big time for him anymore. What’s more, except for the navy, he’d never held a real job.

When I moved, I didn’t just move out of the house. I left Centerville and rented a place over on West Quartz. Me and Whippy Bird still got together for lunch, and Moon developed the habit of stopping by after school when I wasn’t working. I went to Centerville for dinner every week, and sometimes me and Whippy Bird and Toney went out on the town. For the first time in my life, though, I was on my own.

You know what? I liked it. I was just kidding when I told Whippy Bird I’d sleep till noon because I never did that in my life. Sometimes, though, I lay in bed and read
Reader’s Digest.
Or I spread the Sunday paper all over the living room and let it stay there for three or four days until I was good and ready to throw it out.

My little house had just enough backyard for a clothesline and a garden. I had the best lettuce and spinach you ever ate. I grew peas and beets and onions, too. I planted climbing roses that grew up over the fence, and all summer, my house had the sweetest smells. Moon said one of the reasons he liked to visit me was my house always smelled good, from the flowers—or else from something in the oven. “Go on!” I said. “What you mean is have I made any cookies today?”

Two months after I moved into that house, I started on a new career. It was as though somebody, maybe Pink up there, was directing a whole new Effa Commander. Joe Bonnet offered me a job as the manager of the West Park Cafe. Now, I’d been a waitress and a cook and a hostess, but I’d never been a manager. I told Whippy Bird I was scared.

Whippy Bird looked me straight in the eye and said, “Effa Commander, there is nothing in this world you cannot do.” Well, that’s not true, but I did do a good job of managing the restaurant after all, with Whippy Bird right there to give me advice.

It was good advice, like it always is. “You have to be cheap,” she said, and we were that. Coffee for a nickel, a burger for fifteen cents, a fried ham sand for a quarter, and pie a la mode for twenty cents.

You have to be fast, too, Whippy Bird also advised me, because “when you’ve got only thirty minutes for lunch like we secretaries at the Anaconda Company, you don’t want to spend it waiting.” That’s when I came up with Jiffy Lunch Specials. We guaranteed to have them on the table in five minutes or you ate free. They were a smash hit right off the bat. People liked quick, but they liked free even better. They were happy if their lunch came right away without having to wait, but they were even happier when it didn’t, and they got a free meal.

Once a week or so, Whippy Bird took a late lunch, coming in after the rush so we could eat together. She worked because she never was much for sitting around, even now, which is why she helps out at the Jim Hill today. But the main reason she kept on working at the Anaconda Company after she got married was to take the pressure off Toney, give him time to look for a job. Finding a job wasn’t easy for Toney because he didn’t know what he wanted. Except for the navy, the only work he’d ever done was bootlegging and managing Buster. Those were out, and with his leg gone, he couldn’t work in the mines.

Whippy Bird arranged for Toney to talk to the Anaconda Company about working in the publicity department, where he was offered a job. Toney turned it down, telling Whippy Bird he could not be the voice of the Anaconda Company if it meant talking against the union during negotiations. Besides, he said, the only reason the Anaconda Company wanted to hire him was because he was Buster Midnight’s brother.

Finally, Toney leased a filling station, the Toney McKnight Texaco down on the Flats. They tore it down a few years ago for a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Toney worked hard at being a filling station man, and he did a good job. Once gasoline rationing was off, people hit the road in Chrysler Town and Country Woodies and those funny-looking Studebakers that looked the same in the front and back so you couldn’t tell if they were coming or going. They burned a lot of gasoline driving all over the state of Montana to see the mountains and read the Burma Shave signs. You’d see cars with license plates from as far away as Louisiana and West Virginia, big water bags hanging down the front and California coolers sticking out the window. People were throwing up tourist cabins for them to stay in as quick as you could say sucker.

Every day Toney wore a fresh white shirt and pants with that Texaco star on them. He said appearances were important. Whippy Bird said that was because he didn’t do the washing. Even with one leg, Toney could get out to the car and say, “Fill ‘er up?” before the driver turned off the motor. He said people liked a go-getter. When drivers saw him humping like that just to sell gas, it put them in a better mind for buying new batteries or fan belts or having the oil changed.

“Once a hustler,” Whippy Bird told him, and she was right.

Both me and Whippy Bird knew Toney’s heart wasn’t in filling your tank, though. Sometimes when we had lunch in the Park Cafe, Whippy Bird wished there was something else for Toney to do, but she didn’t know what.

Even though he was moody, which Whippy Bird blamed on him missing the limelight, Whippy Bird was as happy with Toney as she was with Chick. He was a good father to Moon and helpful to her in ways Chick never was. He advised Whippy Bird how to ask for a promotion to the accounting department at the Anaconda Company, which she received. He cooked and helped with the dishes and even put in a garden. Whippy Bird told me she hoped I’d find somebody as good as Toney.

“I had Pink,” I told her. “I don’t ever need anybody else.”

“That is surely true, Effa Commander,” she said. “Now that you’re a career gal, you can manage just fine on your own. But I wish you’d meet a good man just the same.” Every now and then Whippy Bird and Toney would set me up with a good man, too, and the four of us would paint the town, but I wasn’t interested in getting serious, so I never saw any of them more than once or twice. I had my job and my house. In the summer, I worked in the yard of an evening, and in the winter I read or listened to the radio. I still had the nice Emerson that Buster bought to listen to May Anna in her early years as a starlet and which he gave to Pink later on. I left Pink’s RCA with Whippy Bird because it seemed to go with that house.

And I had Butte. In those years after the war, that town was always going. It was as crowded on West Park at four in the morning after a shift change as it was at twelve o’clock noon. There were people to watch and places to go. We closed the West Park Cafe at midnight, but there were other restaurants where you could go for a bite. You’d think working in a cafe all day, I would want to go home, but I liked to go out and eat. Sometimes Joe Bonnet came in at closing time, and we went off to Meaderville for Italian. Then we fooled around with the slot machines until almost sunrise. Whippy Bird said I could do worse than Joe Bonnet. Toney said I could do better.

When I started at the West Park Cafe, I worked an early shift, getting in before we opened in the morning then staying till dinnertime. I liked working late, too. So I’d do a week early then switch off. Sometimes I left at midnight and wasn’t even tired, so I went for a walk. Of course, you can’t do that today, but back then you were as safe as if it was broad daylight.

One night I walked all the way down to the Milwaukee depot on Montana. To this day I don’t know why. My feet just took me there. I set out, and that’s where I ended up. I usually didn’t go that far, but it was a nice fall night, and it felt good to be outside in the breeze.

It was about one in the morning, and a train had just pulled in, westbound. Passengers rushed out of the depot grabbing taxis or looking for a streetcar. I liked trains, though the only time I ever went anywhere far away on a train was to visit May Anna. Trains always made me wish I was going someplace. But where would I go?

I stood there across the street from the depot watching the people inside as they went from window to window, pushing open the doors and walking out into the bright spots under the streetlights. Some of them stopped for a minute, looking up at the lights on the Hill or shifting their suitcases. Then they moved on into the shadows and disappeared. It was quiet, but I kept on watching, looking up at that big tower the Milwaukee depot had. It’s a television station now, but it was a fine depot then. It seemed like I was planted there.

He was the last one out of the station, and when I saw him I felt gladness in my heart. He came out slow and stood there like a buck sniffing the air. I never did ask him why he came in on the Milwaukee or where he came from. He just stood holding a suitcase and looking at the Hill like he was trying to convince himself he was finally home. He didn’t see me until I came right up next to him.

“Hi, Buster.”

At first Buster looked at me like he didn’t recognize me. Then he shook his head and his eyes focused and he stared at me a long time. Then he put down the suitcase and grinned. “Hi, babe.” He put his arms around me so tight I could hardly breathe, and when he let loose and I saw his face, there were tears in his eyes. “Effa Commander, you sure look good.”

“I’m glad you’re home, Buster,” I said. “It’s about time.” He nodded, then he took my hand, and we began to walk uptown. “Don’t you want to take the streetcar?” I asked.

“I used to race delivery wagons up and down Montana Street, remember?”

It seemed like old times walking up Montana with Buster. We talked easy, not about jail or May Anna, but about things you’d say if you’d seen the other person just the day before—like what a fine night it was and the price of copper and would he like to stop and have a nice cup of coffee.